


Crows

by goldfishspleen



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Cemetery, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2019-11-29
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21602758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldfishspleen/pseuds/goldfishspleen
Summary: He was chock full of bad ideas. Some of them even hurt. His grief didn't need to be left to rot in a nicely manicured park nobody visited.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Myra Kaspbrak, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15





	Crows

**Author's Note:**

> I should be sleeping. :/

The wind whistled softly through the trees surrounding the green expanse that made up the middle class wet dream of where to throw bodies to forget about them. Eddie had a plot previously purchased in preparation for his inevitable death because of fucking course he did. People died. They were getting up there in years. Decisions were made probably during some midlife panic attack about the eventual end of all things. Entropy. Whatever. 

Richie wasn't present for all that, obviously. They didn't remember each other yet. Despite not being there for it, he could imagine Eddie's whole break down and subsequent search into post mortem preparations with vivid detail. The man always seemed to think his imagined ailments would send him to an early grave anyway. It wasn't a stretch to ascribe that anxiety as a motivation to this particular decision. 

He didn't know if it was considered disrespectful or was strictly legal, but he lit up a cigarette anyway. No one was around, so it wouldn't matter. He came on a weekday morning for that specific reason. Business brought him to New York, but while he was here, it made sense to visit the hollow gesture of an empty grave where his best friend he'd been in love with since forever didn't lie. Smoking reasonably followed. 

He thought he kicked that habit ages ago, but ho hum, who needed lungs anyway? His got pretty used to feeling like the wind got knocked out of them this past month and a half, so why not make things worse?

Funerals were dumb.

Bev somehow managed to wrangle them some invitations to the memorial service back when she heard of it. What a good person, reaching out to the grieving widow. And she truly did, with sincerity and an effort to help in any way she could. The old college try.

He couldn't do it. Jealousy over the love of a corpse was some real stupid shit, but the idea of listening to her cry put acid in his stomach. Unreasonable anger kept dripping from his tear ducts. There was no reaching out on his part.

The whole concept was a badly stitched together farce. A stone memorial atop an empty plot. It was surrounded by fancy boxes made to contain nothing but decay, but there was no box here. No box to hold the body decaying down in the sewers either. Not that there was a big difference between being down there or down here with or without box. 

It wasn't that part that bothered him so much. Either way, Eddie would be worm food. Either way, Eddie didn't like the dark. So what? They drag out his corpse just to put him in a smaller underground space? He picked it out, but the dumbass forgot he didn't like the dark.

Oh, but he wasn't in the dark.

None of it mattered, and that was the punchline. Piles of bones and rancid meat weren't Eddie. The stupid expensive and shiny hunk of rock wasn't Eddie. Eddie was fuckin gone no matter where the bits and pieces or emotionally significant engravings were. None of this pageantry of what grief was supposed to look like would bring him back.

Richie never made it to the actual plot. He stared at it from a distance, finishing his cigarette near some stranger's grave. Not much passed through his usually speeding mind. Just a vague sense of emptiness. After finding a trash bin to discard the butt in, he walked back over to the trees. He sat under the one that looked the most appealing to climb if he were thirty years younger.

The wind smacked his face and brushed his hair away, and the naive, primal side of him could imagine for just a second his love was with him. Maybe they could talk and reminisce about old times. You can't hold wind. There were so many vague feelings and whispers of thoughts he could only get impressions of. He thought maybe he could cry, but he didn't. Instead, he stared out at the ugly rows of gray teeth jutting out from the grass.

He was chock full of bad ideas. Some of them even hurt. His grief didn't need to be left to rot in a nicely manicured park nobody visited. It didn't belong there. He didn't belong there. This belonged to the Eddie that Myra knew. This was theirs, and he hated it with an intensity too big for his body.

He entertained the idea of lying there until the scavengers came for his parts just to ruin the facade. That would be funny. Real fuckin funny. A postmodern installation piece involving the natural wildlife pecking out his useless eyeballs. The poor caretaker, finding a corpse outside of a designated box thinking about how he's not paid enough to deal with some sad sack's gay Edgar Allan Poe bullshit. 

Not that he was truly trying anything quite so dumb (though it would be quite an impressive way to go), but he got bored of laying there after a while. His feelings had subsided enough to sink back down into the region they stayed confined to so he could exist in daily life. Now he was just cold and his clothes were damp from the morning dew. His face was wet from the mourning dew. Hilarious. 

He got up and walked away. At the gate, he glanced back, counting rows and columns to locate Eddie's spot from a distance. The Eddie he knew didn't belong in this place either.


End file.
